Today, we’re excited to announce the release of Social Authority, our metric of Twitter users’ influence. There are plenty of vanity metrics out there, but Social Authority offers something compellingly different.

Social Authority Helps Marketers

Social Authority is not about bragging rights or merchant discounts. Nor is it something that you check once and then forget about. Our metric is immediately, reliably useful. You can order all active Twitter users by influence, dissect your social graph, or find new followers who are most important -- right now.

But it’s more than just exploring your own followers (or those of a competitor): Social Authority is ultimately a measure of influential activity. As such, it highlights content that is successful on Twitter. When you find users with high Social Authority, you’re finding great marketing strategies to analyze and mimic. And we think that this will help you be more successful with Twitter.

Finally, Social Authority is transparent. We could use all sorts of fuzzy words to explain how we compute our score, but we recognize that marketers need to see the “man behind the curtain.” Without insight into how we value influence, you can’t personally validate what makes us special, nor can you trust that our score is backed by deep research and thought.

Social Authority is Based on Retweets

Quite simply, our score includes three components:

The retweet rate of a few hundred of the measured user’s last non-@mention tweets

A time decay to favor recent activity versus ancient history

Other data for each user (such as follower count, friend count, and so on) that are optimized via a regression model trained to retweet rate

We’ll discuss why we’re focusing on retweets in a moment. For now, let’s consider the latter two items.

First, social media is very much a “what have you done for me lately” medium. In fact, the half-life of a tweet is a mere 18 minutes.

For this reason, we aggressively discount scores for users who haven’t tweeted lately.

Second, our regression model is a powerful addition to Social Authority. In part, it helps smooth the occasionally jumpy retweet rates of users. But, more than that, it accounts for the fact that retweets are a scarce commodity. For example, an average user needs 10,000 followers before 25% of their tweets are retweeted. Indeed, it’s only very popular users who get a large percentage of their tweets retweeted.

Our regression model helps fill in the blanks for the large majority of users with a spotty history of retweets.

Retweets are the Currency of Social

So, why retweets?

Well, whether you call them “shares” (Facebook), “repins” (Pinterest), or retweets, circulating someone else’s content to your network is a remarkable activity -- and pretty much universal across all social networks. It demonstrates a significant commitment to the originating content.

Moreover, retweets are a great proxy for other important data.

For example, as you might expect, the number of retweets a user gets correlates strongly with the number of @mentions that user receives, with a correlation of ~0.8.

Even more excitingly, a higher retweet rate is associated with more traffic to tweeted URLs. In fact, the retweet rate is a stronger predictor of clicks than follower count! The correlations are ~0.7 and ~0.45, respectively.

This comparison is perhaps not entirely fair: Twitter-originating traffic counts are hard to obtain in large quantities. So, we limit ourselves only to users who use bit.ly shortened links: perhaps not a totally representative sample. We also apply the same time discount to our traffic rate as we do to our retweet rate; this may heighten the correlation.

Still, it’s exciting to see that retweets are a great measure of traffic potential.

You might ask, “Why not just use traffic as the basis for Social Authority?” Well, while clicks might be your ultimate goal, that isn’t the same for everyone. Indeed, retweets represent a native measure of social success. That is, for many accounts, traffic isn’t the goal. Rather, the focus is on increased engagement and resonance of one’s social content. Retweets are a better social-specific metric.

(By the way, a good rule of thumb: consider a 10:1 ratio when it comes to clicks and retweets. That is, if a tweet gets 10 retweets, it’s probably garnering about 100 clicks. We’ll delve into this in a future blog post.)

What Does Social Authority Mean in Practice?

Do we add value beyond what’s already out there? That’s a good question. After all, follower count by itself is a great measure of influence. And it’s the challenge of any metric creator to offer something appreciably better.

Here, for example, we see that Klout scores correlate strongly with follower counts.

We aren’t picking on Klout. Social Authority has a similar relationship to follower count. Quite simply, people with lots of followers are generally more influential!

But we believe it’s the subtle re-ranking of a users that reveals the value of Social Authority versus follower count (or other metrics out there).

Now, we’re going to use Followerwonk to sort all active Twitter users and show you those with the highest Social Authority.

Yes, we also put Bieber on top! (Who doesn’t!?)

We’ve highlighted a number of accounts in red. Take a close look at these. We were initially surprised to see these accounts with high Social Authority so we went back and checked the data. Sure enough, these accounts get retweeted a lot. For example, @autocorrects is retweeted 7% more than @BarackObama, yet has 14 times fewer followers!

As you can see, Social Authority surfaces a completely different set of top users: those that are extremely effective in engaging their followers. Perhaps jump onto Twitter and look at their content. Expand their tweets: that’s where the magic is. Those in red often have a similar content strategy: short, pithy, often humorous, and targeted well to their audience.

This isn’t content that we necessarily like -- often, quite the opposite! Rather, these accounts have found the secret sauce: retweet bait. They’ve discovered content that gets their audiences’ attention, whether we like it or not, and prompts action in terms of retweets and traffic.

To us, at least, this is a revelation. We’ve always assumed that success on Twitter was largely about careful engagement, timely replies, and, sure, the occasional pithy remark. And that indeed may be a great strategy. But from the perspective of retweets (and clicks), engagement doesn’t matter at all. Many of these accounts never @mention anyone.

Social Authority is focused on content, versus users. When computing our metric, we don’t directly care how many followers a user has. Instead, our interest is in the content that she creates, and how it resonates with her audience. This is what sets Social Authority apart as a metric.

Let’s take a look at how you can leverage Social Authority right now.

Social Authority Use Case: Refining Your Engagement Strategy

One of the most effective uses of Twitter is to reach out to other people. That is, you want to leverage other people to retweet your content and spread your message to their audience.

Social Authority and the engagement metrics we released in December can help.

Simply, you want to find that sweet spot of users who are both influential, and also likely to respond to any engagement that you direct at them.

Step 1. Go to Followerwonk and do a bio search for keywords related to your industry. Limit the search to your followers. (Here’s an example.)

Step 2. Sort by Social Authority.

Step 3. Mouse over each user and find those with a high engagement rate. This will reveal possible candidates for direct engagement (DMs, @contacts, or even RTs of their content).

Here, for example, are the most influential followers of @followerwonk with “SEO” in their bio.

On mouse-over, I see that Rand has a really high engagement rate. Over 60% of his tweets are @mentions of other people! Notice that we have a bidirectional relationship (the little arrows): that is, he follows us, and we follow him. He’d be a great one to contact (if we weren’t already seeing him in the office pretty much everyday)!

Social Authority Use Case: Content Insights

Let’s say you’re thinking of opening a restaurant in the Bay Area. How can you use Twitter, and Social Authority, to help?

In this report, we see that there are ~400 who follow all of them. We can pop this list of users open and sort by Social Authority.

As we mouse-over each user, we discover their engagement rates. Note that @chefsymon, with the highest Social Authority in this list, has a rocking 86% engagement rate! Compare this to, say, Zagats with a mere 6.5% rate.

Which is the better choice to @engage in an attempt to attract their attention (and retweets)?

But there’s more we can do with this list then find potential brand amplifiers. Notice, for example, that @Francis_Lam, with a “mere” 34,000 followers has a great Social Authority score. It’s worth jumping into his tweet stream and looking carefully at his content.

What is it about his style that generates so many retweets? His frequent tweeting? His food-related one-liners?

While we will discuss content strategies in a later blog post, we believe that, to some extent, there are different content strategies for each industry. What works well for one audience, won’t work for others. So, carefully examining high Social Authority users -- particularly those who are outliers in terms of having relatively few followers -- is a great way to discover the content that ignites your audience.

Absolutely Jazy! This is really an awesome addition to SEOMOZ's armory. With social signals playing a vital role in search engine rankings, this is the right time for us the webmasters to measure them with metrics such as this. Retweets and favorites, likes and shares, repins are some of the important metrics which help the search engines see what users find interesting and rank the same for the related keyword so that it can help others on the web.

I was preparing a stuff for posting in SEOmoz about importance of Twitter in social media area.

So I wish to share some those details I got from my researches.

Twitter IDs with good power will be highly beneficial in SEO

Number of Tweets Number of times the tweets listedActivity - periodical - Influence achieved by number of followersNumber of Retweets achieved

Age of the Twitter IDPower achieved from the power of followerspercentage of spam score achieved etcVerified twitter IDs get more points, followersMore pointing links to Twitter IDs (URLs) will get better points, followers and PR

Recently Twitter IDs sharing good videos, photos gets more power quickly than getting more followers and re-tweets

An ID which has highest number of followers and lowest people following will get highest power

For Example Twitter id of Dalailama https://twitter.com/DalaiLama got more than 6,278,200 followers and it is not at all following any twitter id. That profile got Google Page Rank 7 (equal PR of Google.co.in)

Twitter ID of Obama https://twitter.com/BarackObama also got PR 7 but see the difference of number of follower of Lama and Obama (which is 6,278,200 and 27,148,791) Here the ratio in followers vs following is playing the game of power.

There are many factors connected to good social signals from Twitter

If an ID has no image chance to getting more followers and power are too lowFake Following IDs may not get full mark even they got plenty of followers and retweetsLanguage used in tweet is importantFollow vs following ratio

More talkative persons (if the tweets are not interesting ) may loose followers, points etc

Inactive IDs may loose points, followers (may not improve its points, number of followers etc)

I have also conducted many case studies on getting and loosing social signals from Twitter.

If a Twitter id is suspended, website pages bookmarked with that ID will definitely loose their SERP

If you upload a ppt or video in slideshare or dailymotion, optimize it with description and bookmark it with Twitter, it will get improvement in SERP. That ppt or video is getting power of publishing site as well as from twitter IDs. If the twitter id got suspended for violating any Twitter TOCs like tweeting more than their limits, following or unfollowing more than their allowed limits, IDs will be suspended. Web page, sites, bookmarked with that suspended twitter ID will loose their position in search engine listing.

What a long comment! I agree that Twitter can be beneficial for SEO, especially if you get tweets from authorities.However, I think that Google+ carry more SEO value. I believe that Google gives more value to it's product to force webmasters and internet marketeers to use it and because Google has full insight into data from Google+.

Dear BojanThanks for your comment, you are right G+ surely carry more power as it belongs to G God - Still few doubts are remaining in my mind regarding Google's approach to "link building" Most of the optimized website will put Google plus in their web pages and Google will get back links for each G+ placements (which includes high quality sites to low quality websites) G's updates against low quality back links will not affect their pages as those links coming from G+ placements are natural, placed by the users) But surely there are few things in their G+ installation code. As a web developer Bojan can try to analyze it.

There was high debate during the launch of G+. 99% of public voice sound like Google started G+ to beat FB. But in SEO view point G+ has given some sort of points more than twitter. Actually there many ideas are behind G + like tracking user activity. All are for their ad purpose.

Great to have a breakdown on how the metric works and why you think it'll be of use to us - I can already see a ton of ways as to how it could. Take guest posting, for example, if you find the twitter handle of a blogger/webmaster who writes on a blog related to your niche and they have a good social authority score, this immediately stands out to me as someone you might want to outreach to. Not only would the potential social signals be producing a "strong" (in terms of SEO value) blog, but more importantly you could be reaching out and posting in front of a highly engaged audience - that's really exciting.

Having FollowerWonk as part of the Moz package has seriously been one of the absolute highlights for me in the last 6-12 months. Such a terrific tool and real value for money - allowing us to not only find potential new leads but to find those engaged users and audiences that can make a big difference to any campaign.

Don't suppose you're thinking of doing the same thing with Google+, are you? ;)

Great stuff. I gets me thinking. As Social and search "hold hands" more and more going forward, a holistic approach will likely be a good thing. Compartmentalizing efforts seems like it will hold one back. I work on a team where we can really collaborate rather easily. Maybe it's because we are not a giant company. I wonder how a holistic approach to internet marketing - social, SEO, content marketing, etc - will work for larger companies going forward.

Good question, and I think that's still being defined. In larger enterprises, you often see a real division of labor in terms of SEO and social. Like anything, that has its pros and cons. But you're right in that taking a holistic approach is probably more productive, particularly for smaller organizations.

1. Are you counting both types of Retweet? That is, when I hit Twitter's Retweet button, and when I manually copy and paste a Tweet and preceed it with RT?

2. You say you are measuring "The retweet rate of a few hundred of the measured user’s last non-@mention tweets". Does that mean if somebody Retweets one of my Tweets that contains an @ mention, it won't be counted? Or is it only when the @ mention is at the beginning of the Tweet?

We only count "official" retweets. We do this because for each tweet that we analyze, Twitter provides the RT count in the API call for that tweet. In other words, we rely on Twitter to provide the RT computation. To try to count non-official RTs is a messy business, as it would require a lot more Twitter API calls for possibly negligible benefit.

Why negligible? We make an assumption that non-official RTs correlate strongly with official RTs. We can then use the latter as a proxy for the former. This assumption may not be true, of course. That is, by not using non-official RTs, we may ignore pockets of users who generate many more unofficial RTs... perhaps those who ask a question, or invite a response?

This cool stuff but I am a little concerned about the lack of love for @mentions. Why not simply look at RT and Mentions equally?Usually a RT is going to happen when you send a tweet with a URL in it. However, if you are "popular" in your niche a bunch of people will be asking you questions or referencing you each day. Anyhow, just some thoughts.

Thanks. First, @mentions correlate really strongly with RTs. In the 0.9s or higher, if I recall correctly. Second, @mentions are possibly misleading. For example, @BarackObama probably had many, many @mentions during yesterday's State of the Union, despite the fact that he (presumably) wasn't tweeting during that event! While that certainly indicates some type of important "influence", it isn't related to activity he is doing on Twitter. We want our score to directly measure a person's Twitter activity, not their potential, or their real-life popularity.

Social authority is incredibly important for a brand. Measuring social authority by the number of retweets is very interesting. I have never thought about using retweets to measure social authority. Thanks for this new perspective.

So, I can gain authority by posting more inspiration quotes and photos of cats?? Awesome!

All those accounts in red show the problem by counting retweets. It is the same problem that Klout and other attempts at determining authority have.

You are only tracking metrics that are available for you to track. Real authority comes in how many people pay attention and act based on what they say. If I quote other people and that gets retweeted, I add nothing to the conversation, yet by this metric I would have high authority. The real authority would be in the people who's ideas I am tweeting.

The problem will all attempts at determining social media authority is that it rests upon a very small set of data. The authority algorithms use that data, not because it is the best or logical data to determine authority, but because there is no other data to use.

Good points. As you note, it'd be hard to use data that's not available to us! ;) But the fact that retweets correlate with clicks (of links tweeted) suggests that from a marketing perspective using retweets as a basis for a score is a good barometer.As you note, the top Social Authority accounts might not necessarily be the ones driving conversations or adding huge eschatalogical value. But the retweets (and clicks) that they generate are valuable, and an indicator of success.

Shouldn't the author of the link which is retweeted, not the person who tweets the link, be the real authority?

Google Author is a much better step in this direction.

I know many people who do nothing but autofollow, build up huge follower numbers and then spam their stream with links and other quotes that will get retweeted. They don't really have authority, they are just gaming Twitter.

Yep, people do try that, but few of them succeed. That is, they won't usually get lots of (legit) followers... but even if they do, they won't garner that many (legit) retweets.

Most people who do really well aren't just spitting out quotes (though some are), they're often creating unique retweet bait content, such as jokes, horoscopes, and other pithy observations. For time immemorial this sort of content has garnered lots of attention.

But you indeed point out that, just like black hat in SEO, there are people who try to game the system by setting up automated systems. Few of them have long-term success, versus accounts crafting their own content (see @autocorrects for example).

An interesting conundrum posed by data limitations. In my mind, the value in a "pass thru" retweet is in drawing attention to something you otherwise have missed - a funnel / filter of sorts. Is there a way to distinguish the straight push-a-button retweets from the ones where the sender has attempted to add in an albeit brief, suggestion as to why you should pay attention?

We could distinguish between those, but it would be imprecise, and I'm not sure that there'd be enough volume in terms of comments in RTs to both test that hypothesis and use as a score component. But it's definitely an interesting point, and one that deserves perhaps a blog post to explore it more!

While I admire the effort, I have to agree with Everywhere Trip on this one. This isn't a measure of social influence, it's simply a measure of how likely someone is to share content from someone they already follow. On the surface that may seem like the same thing, but unless you've got data showing that people are more likely to actually be influenced -- meaning change their behavior in some measurable way (sales, perhaps) -- you can't prove that retweet ratios are any more accurate a measure than followers or mentions or whether the Twitter handle has an X in it. And as you've pointed out, apparently people with social influence are either pop stars or people who produce content that your aunt would typically forward to the family via an obnoxious email thread. My takeaway is that I should understand my audience and produce content they want to share with their friends; not really anything groundbreaking there. Even if I try to find an "influencer" with high retweet ratios, it doesn't mean my brand-specific content will be anything their fans will care about.I am still waiting for the day when I read a headline about social influence and what follows is a scientific study proving that certain metrics actually align with someone being influenced.

Just a bit of a correction on your summary of what the score is. It's not a measure of the likelihood that they themselves will retweet, but rather that their tweets will be retweeted! :)

As you imply, one problem with the word "influence", in my mind, is that it does suggest a persuader-persuadee relationship. I'm not sure that's entirely the right way to think of social engagement. Perhaps "resonance" would be a better term. That is, how likely is it that a person's content will resonate with their audience.

Using actual sales as an underlying metric would be great. But most people aren't selling things.

As well, when we look at the frothy top of millions of users, of course we're going to see users surfaced that are rather trivial and silly. Such as Bieber and the like. I don't think that this suggests a flaw with the ranking, but rather an accurate representation of whose content really is resonating with the majority of Twitter. Whether we like it or not, that generally equates to teen pop idols.

However, when you start to delve into smaller segments of users, particularly those focused on a particular industry, I think you'll find that their ranking is rather interesting and useful.

Wow! I think the math is quite robust. RT is also intuitively a more relevant metric than followers.

Having said that, must also state that no measure will be perfect. I've just had a debate with a colleague on this post and we both observed that even RT cud be critiqued - e.g. a religious leader says don't RT this tweet, and as a result none of her (let's assume) 3m followers RT. The algo in its current format would penalize her social authority, and give an inaccurate measure of her influence. Social influence is inherently a fuzzy thing.

But intellectual arguments aside, I heartily congratulate you on this move.Btw, may I suggest a similar effort for measuring YouTube influence. Quite frustratingly Klout hasn't been able to do that. SEOMOZ cud be the first mover in that space

Ah! Don't feel guilty.You and Matt did a terrific job with this post and I will reference it in the mozinar.Said that, it will be more about the following step: how applying a correct social content curation in order to create your Social Authority thanks to the "home work" you have done before in selecting both the correct "general" target and those ones, who can help you grow.

Very insightful post. The fact that Bieber and other entertainers top the list in followers and retweets speaks volumes about the average demographic of Twitter. :-)

I think this post proves that it's imperative to acquire the right target audience that cares about your tweets and will be engaged in sharing and dialog. There's no payoff in adding followers for the sake of having followers.

If you are followed by other people with a high social authority will that factor into my own social authority? For instance, if I am an seo followed by google and seomoz that should obviously show that I am somewhat of an authority. Similar to getting a link from an authoritative website. I don't expect anything but the best from you guys and this looks no different!

No, we don't directly take the particular relationships of a user into account. We focus directly on their content and retweets of that content. It's something we thought about for a bit,and worth exploring, but we felt that follow events were less valuable than direct engagement with a user's content.

I've got to give you props for all the hard work you've put into this post ... you've done a great job at showing us a lot of detail, put in the work for nice colorful info-graphics and written a good deal of content. However, this article boils down to this one simple statement.

I want to analyze followers by geographic location. I want a list of followers in my area, but I don't see a way of sorting this out besides downloading my entire list of 19,000 followers and sorting them by hand. The geographic tool only lets you see that there are 70 followers or whatnot in an area, but I can't look at that list?

I agree with you. Retweets are a great measuring tool of success when it comes to social authority. Traffic is not enough! You have to get in touch with the users who really follow you and make your work part of their social life. Indeed, if you have more retweets, more possibility of getting more clicks. Anyway, thanks for sharing!

Awesome post Matt. Social authority is awesome (though I will say that our own score leaves lots of room for growth :-) You have given some great ideas on how to mine for opportunity to enhance our social authority, and by extension, reach and traffic. Thanks for sharing.

Great post Peter, always appreciate data-driven insights you guys produce at Moz. One question though, do you think Followerwonk can have the capacity for social network analysis in future? Mentionmapp have done some work in this area, but their product is still in beta and isn't quite as actionable as it can be. I think it would be invaluable if Followerwonk had functionality that would allow to analyse twitter networks visually.

PeterYour statistics are amazing and you have described the things in very effective order. This is very surprising and interesting to know that fact that RT's are much effective than lots of Followers. But my question is that - Are Retweets contributes in ranking or not ? If not then what are their consequences in Google ranking after several recent Google updates.

After a chat about Retweets in our office I was just about to ask a question about the 2 different types of RT until i noticed the first question by Mark Hodson a couple of comments above this one. Does anyone have any insight on this?

To generate traffic for website social media is playing very important role now only SEO is not enough it needs help of SMO - Social Media Optimization and Being Social on these networks helps to build the brand name, Twitter is One of the main Social network (Micro Blogging Site) and it helps to gain attention of valued readers and publishers over net... The information provided in article is awesome... Thanks Alot!

Finally something worth reading. I use twitter sometimes but often I find myself forgetting about it as you had mentioned that many people do. I like the way this is laid out because when I use twitter I find myself struggling to find those people who are going to retweet. Most of the people that I have found usually read the tweet and may even click on the link but very seldom do they ever actually retweet anything.

Heheh, sorry about that! If you go to Followerwonk.com, and do any action which surfaces users, you will see Social Authority next to their name. If you want to see your Social Authority score, you can do so by logging in and then looking here.

In your example about @chefsymon, the combination of very high SA score + high engagement rate confounds me. Doesn't an 86% engagement rate suggest that only the 14% "non-conversational" tweets are retweetable? Then how the high SA score?

Since you take an even sample volume of recent tweets, that cancels out the argument that he may just tweet much more frequently to get those RTs from the 14%. So, the only argument left is that @chefsymon drives RTs from his own RTs (maybe he's a great curator). If that's the case, a savvy marketer would look to uncover his sources.

Remember that there are a few possible components for each user's Social Authority, including the RT rate of their non-@mention tweets, time decay, and a regression model. In his case, yes, we only look at the non-@mention tweets, not RTs that he makes.